How Is Wolfram|Alpha Like a Matryoshka Doll?

Wolfram|Alpha is different from most of the tools out there on the web that you might use to get answers. Rather than inundate you with lists of links to web pages that may or may not be useful, Wolfram|Alpha works to understand your query.

What really sets these different approaches apart is how they deal with complexity in queries. Whether there are many concurrent factors to your question or you have a unique math computation with an answer that simply does not exist on some web page, Wolfram|Alpha is your best bet for a web service that actually understands what you are asking.

One of the ways that complexity can appear in queries is in depth, when there are multiple steps to a question. To understand what we mean by “depth,” think of the beautiful Matryoshka dolls that all fit inside of each other.

There is still plenty to do in this realm. We’re ensuring that the links between our datasets all conform to the standards required for this kind of nesting; building up the natural-language capacity to handle qualifiers (such as dates for nested population queries); and, of course, continuously extending the relational patterns that Wolfram|Alpha can recognize. And so we remain hard at work building up the computable capacity of the world’s only real knowledge engine.

4 Comments

1. You say that the main differrence with Wolfram Alpha is that it works to umderstand the query. Another major differrence is that its data is more reliable because it goes through a checking process called ‘curation’ to qualify for inclusion in its database.

2.Please add here Wolfram Apha’s preferred form of input for nested queries in a form that is usable for input. At present you show blocks but we can’t input blocks. I use brackets but cannot be sure this is right for Wolfram Alpha.

Oops, I see you have used brackets in an example. It would help if you showed how having resolved the query/queries within single brackets the nested
lquery became simpler the process being repeated until a simple query remained with no brackets at all.
I am assuming WA uses unique tags to its database and gives them IDs. I will show these as WATAGn. I assume that each Mathematica function also has a unique ID.

Strangely, yesterday I responed to a question on the Forum about muliti dimensional space. This until now I would have dismissed it as having no significance to me. Yet now I can see all knowledge existing in a multidimensional space and the query narrowing it down to the space/s where the answer exists.